


a blessing outside myself

by thingswithwings



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angels, Emotion Play, Orgy, Other, Tears, idk this story is really hard to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 12:31:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/992033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithwings/pseuds/thingswithwings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Josie knows that the angels will be leaving soon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a blessing outside myself

**Author's Note:**

> Based on episode 32, but not too spoilery I don't think. Set pre-episode.
> 
> Title from [this English translation](http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/classicalmusictips/qt/Voi-Che-Sapete-Che-Cosa-E-Amor-Lyrics-And-Text-Translation.htm) of Voi, Che Sapete, from Mozart's _Marriage of Figaro_.

Josie knows that the angels will be leaving soon.

Carefully, quietly, they've been setting her up to live on her own. Erika shook out all the rugs and scrubbed the floors, washed the walls, cleaned all the windows until the creaky old place was sparkling inside and out. Erika, wearing an apron printed with oranges and lemons over hir flowing robes of majesty, put up the peppers and tomatoes and beans from the garden, so that the root cellar was packed full of stacked jars, each one neatly labeled in an incomprehensible ancient language that seems to shift and change on its own, and that fills Josie with unutterable, indefinable emotion when she looks at it. And Erika spent a week with a hammer in hir hand and nails poking out of hir impossibly wide mouth, fixing every little creaky board, replacing the rotten section of the front porch, rewiring the buzzing bathroom light, even fixing the TV so that it played in color again.

"Come on, my loves," Josie says, at the end of what feels like the last day of work, taking their hands. The angels gaze upon her gladly, woefully, clustering around her and following her into their bedroom.

They undress her solemnly. Her clothes are folded and put away, or hung up properly in the closet, or placed reverentially in the hamper. Josie stands still and lets them do it, lifting her feet slowly for them to take off her hose and her underwear, lifting her arms for them to pull off her blouse, shrugging her shoulders forward when they unhook her brassiere. Erika lets her hold hir arm while she lifts her feet, keeps her steady so she doesn't fall.

It's been a boon, having them around; with her arthritis, it's hard to do the hooks and buttons sometimes. The angels have thin, long-fingered hands, four or five knuckles on each finger. They work all the clasps easily.

When they're done, she stands bare and brown and wrinkled in the room where she was born, the last glow of twilight dusting through the windows and caressing her with warm fingers. Josie sighs at the pleasure of it.

"I know you're leaving soon," she starts to say, but Erika puts hir long black finger to Josie's lips. 

"Time is an illusion," Erika says. Erika's voice, unlike Erika's or Erika's, is high and clear, tickling into the folds of Josie's skin the way Josie's first taste of champagne tickled her mouth on her wedding day. 

"We are always leaving soon," Erika agrees. Erika's voice, unlike Erika's or Erika's, is low and gravelly, tectonic in the way it penetrates to Josie's bones, her organs, her blood.

"We will never leave you," Erika finishes. Erika's voice, unlike Erika's or Erika's, is multi-toned, like a thousand voices singing in harmony, reminiscent of a Wagnerian crescendo in even the softest murmur.

"I'm going to miss you," Josie says. She's seen plenty of loss in her time, and stopped weeping a long time ago. No matter her feelings; the tears don't come these days. But she touches the faces of the angels as softly as she can, hoping they know how deeply she feels it.

They curl together in the wide bed that has cradled Josie through her whole life, cradled every lover she's ever known. As they lay their bodies down together the angels' raiment falls away and they are their bare forms: long arms and legs, wide open eyes and mouths on their faces and hands, their bellies smooth and unmarked by the love of the womb. 

Unspeaking, they touch her with the pads of their fingers, with their mouths, pressing their hot foreheads to her temple, her shoulder, her fat belly. Their touch is unhesitating and uninflected: not the touch of an ardent lover, nor of a curious observer, nor of a disgusted higher being. Their touch is full of meaning but empty of direction, simply existing in the crevices of her body, as though the angels are gusts of wind turned solid and adoring. They touch her as they always do, without regard for the meaning of each part of her body, lavishing attention equally on her eyelids, her nipples, the wrinkles on her knees and the inner folds of her ears. They put themselves inside her and around her, stroke the wiry, curling hairs on her head individually, press against the pucker of her asshole and the spaces between her toes. 

Sometimes, when they do this, their touch brings her to joy, her body clutching and rising beneath them into a slow, easy orgasm; on those days, each touch feels like white fire, like desire made flesh, and her whole body becomes an organ of that desire. She arches beneath the angels' touch, her body one continuous, aching erogenous zone, undifferentiated and filled full with pleasure. The angels have genitalia, and they touch her with that, too, sometimes against her and sometimes inside of her, pulsing with their own strange rhythm. 

Other times they awaken not desire or physical pleasure but comfort, warmth and quietude flowing through her at the sensation of their long fingers bent kindly inside her, their mouths pressed intimately to her skin. On those occasions she feels something like sleep, something like contentment sink into the cells of her body where they touch her, and she imagines that this is how infants might feel when they're touched. She is grounded in the solid, heavy reality of her body, but porous, too, open to the air and the bodies around her. 

And occasionally their touch has instilled a feeling of a darker sort, arousing the surface of her skin to regret, or loneliness, or the rough familiar ache of long-held grief. On those occasions she has gasped and leaned into the caresses of the angels, eager for the deep, raw feeling that they poured through her.

Today, as they touch her, her body responds with sorrow. 

Erika trails hir hand along Josie's thigh, and the feeling that spreads through her nerves is of sinking, of falling; Erika, on her right, rubs gently at her collarbone, and the sensation of overwhelming loss sinks into her skin; and on her left, Erika presses mouths to the side of her breast, and the tickle of hir lips is the opening of a void within her, starless and empty, enough to make her collapse in on herself like a dying star.

"Oh," Josie says, softly. "Oh," as the angels touch her, suck on her earlobe, shift and rub themselves slowly against her thighs, "oh," the sorrow penetrating her cells, permeating her entire being. This is their sorrow, she comes to understand, the angels' sorrow where it mixes with hers, as it had been their desire, their joy, their comfort, their loneliness and regret. This is the four of them feeling together, and the feeling they are making is this one, and together they are all borne away by the wave, pulled down together into dark, fathomless oceans of heartache. She's wet from it, tears beginning to pool and stream down her cheeks, slowly at first but then faster, until her body is pouring, spilling itself outwards; she shakes and spasms, sobs wracking her body; she gasps for air and writhes on the bed and the angels are pressed close, so close, holding her while she cries.

Eventually she is lost to the feeling, the void finally expanding within her until she is swallowed up. She weeps for a long time, then, until there are no more tears left in her, until she is empty of everything she's held for so long. Erika and Erika and Erika never let her go, never stop their slow soothing sorrowful touches, never leave her alone in it.

As she comes down from the feeling she rolls, laboriously, onto her side, and the angels spoon up around her, Erika behind her, and Erika in front of her, while Erika curls around her knees.

"Thank you," she says, after a long time. "Thank you."

"We – " Erika hesitates, something Josie has never heard hir do before, the light ticklish bubbling of hir voice strangely shy. "We are going to miss you too, Josie."

"Even though time is an illusion," Erika agrees, solemnly. 

Josie laughs. Her face is stiff from the salt of her tears, and it feels odd to smile.

"Even so," she says.

"You have been good to us," Erika says, hir voice less Wagnerian for once, more like the lightest, saddest moments in a Mozart aria. _Voi, Che Sapete_ , Josie decides. "And you are an excellent conduit for the vibrations of the eternal harmony."

Josie stretches up to kiss Erika on the forehead; Erika bends hir head solemnly to accept it. 

"Back atcha," Josie says.

*

The next day, when she wakes up, the angels are gone.

They've left before, for hours or even days. This feels different.

Josie hobbles to the kitchen – today is a day when she'll need her cane, but she left it by the door – and finds the teapot full, a cup of tea steaming next to it. It's exactly the right temperature to allow her to take the first, slow sip. 

_Time is an illusion_ , she thinks. 

Next to the teapot is a letter written in an incomprehensible ancient language that seems to shift and change on its own, and that fills Josie with unutterable, indefinable emotion when she looks at it. She can't read any of the words, but below the text are three signatures, Erika, Erika, and Erika. Erika dotted hir i with a smiley face, and Erika with a flower, and Erika with a triangle and a three that Josie thinks means _heart_.

Josie, out of long habit, lays her hand over her own heart and sighs deeply.

"Come home soon," she says, rubbing her thumb over the Erikas' names.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] a blessing outside myself](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1189917) by [nickelmountain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nickelmountain/pseuds/nickelmountain)




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